Introducing Judith G. Levy

I first encountered Judith G. Levy’s hybrid visual-verbal portraits at la Esquina Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri in May 2015. Her show of black and white posters, approximately 14 x 20 inches in size, actually began outside the gallery. Levy had taken phrases from her posters and written them on handmade signs attached to what looked like fenceposts, which were staked in a grassy area in front of the gallery. Though one may have expected these handwritten signs to advertise a lemonade stand or garage sale, Levy’s bold phrases subverted white-picket-fence expectations, with such statements as: “BECAME A WOMAN,” “WAS A SOCIALIST,” “SURVIVED GHETTO UPRISING,” and “MARRIED HIM ANYWAY.” I was hooked while I was still in the parking lot, drawn inside the gallery by Levy’s startling and complex depictions of her family.

Family Memoir incorporates text and photographs of Levy’s family members from the late 1800s through the 1970s. As such, it serves as a kind of ghost-filled family album, inspired by the past but reanimated and reimagined through observation, memory, letters, family tales, and Levy’s remarkable vision. Levy’s posters are hybrid works in the truest sense, narratives told through photography and language that work synergistically and achieve a jarring and riveting intensity.

In Family Memoir, Levy explores familial relationships and identity, including powerful inquiries into gender, religion, class, and sexual orientation. Seemingly ordinary family photos are joined by Levy’s terse, haiku-like statements that are as lacerating and fraught as they are poetic. Here, language penetrates through the many layers of the photographs and captures the characters within. Their hopeful smiles and dry stares are cast against the future, known or imagined by Levy who writes from a prescient, god-like vantage point. The people in these photographs are both innocent and haunted, wracked by loss, war, and infidelities to come but also restored by humor, art, and love. We learn of love affairs with gangsters; secretive visionaries, artists, and drunks; and the mysterious disappearances of young men in Haight-Ashbury. The ordinary is recast as extraordinary via Levy’s fantastical vision in art that continues to delight and surprise.

Following is just a sample from Judith G. Levy’s ongoing project Family Memoir, which currently includes three dozen posters. Through Levy’s art, we are witness to stunning hybrid works that remind us of our own humanity and the precarious nature of our strange and awe-filled lives.